How to Crop, Rotate, Scale, and Flip Images in WordPress

Did you know that you can do the basic image editing in the WordPress backend? What do we mean by basic? Well simply cropping, rotating, scaling image sizes, and flipping the vertically or horizontally. When using WordPress for micro-blogging or when writing a quick post on the go, you will often find yourself limited to softwares. One example would be when you do not have your own computer and have to rely on public computers to publish a post. Why use a third-party image editor just to resize or crop your image when WordPress can do the job for you. In this article, we will show you how to use WordPress as a basic image editor that lets you crop, rotate, scale, and flip images.

Video Tutorial

Subscribe to WPBeginner

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

First thing you need to do is upload your image. You can add it while you are writing a post or by going to the Media » Add New tab.

Then once your image is uploaded, you just need to click on the little button that says Edit Image.

You will be taken to an screen that looks like this:

Just select the area you want to crop. Or click on the rotate / flipping icon. You can click to scale. You can even crop based on ratio. Pretty handy little feature right?

36 Comments

I am using wordpress 4.9.5 on an IPad mini. When I go to scale an image all the selections work until I press the scale button; the image is cropped but I only get about 1/2 the width of the original crop selection. Anyone see this problem?

This does not work at all and is not in the least bit helpful. WordPress is the most horrid place to try to work with images. My featured images in my posts list pages are all cut – cropped out and only show a partial photo. I have tried all kinds of plugins that wp beginner has suggested and none of them work at all. I use the Awaken theme and the author will not respond to fix his worthless theme. The site that I am working on will have to be deleted because of wordpress being such a horrid cms to work with.

I dont get that menu when i click edit image.. i am using bluehost.. i cant do anything to the images that are loading rotated 90 degrees.. fyi they not rotated when loaded to other sites.. this is specific to wordpress bluehost

when you scale an image from the media library, does it automatically reduce the quality of the image in every post/page where it was previously published or is it necessary to load it again in each single page to speed up the site?

I just discovered this yesterday. However, it seems to scale it on the fly as GTMetrix said that scaling images (that I had scaled using the tools above) was slowing down my page loading. I turned off Photon to be sure it wasn’t a cached image and also cleared my cache.

I must admit, the editing of photographs is not very clear. I thought I had it all sorted and when I published it the image was huge and you only saw our eyes. I understand that the scale image has to be adjusted, but come on guys, we are all not up to speed with stuff like that. We want idiot proof editing and there are plenty on the market that do such. please have a look at it or you will lose this customer very quickly

I’ve played with that edit feature, but cannot figure out how to get it to lock the aspect ratio. Let’s say I want a contributor to upload an image and then crop the part to show as the thumbnail before saving it. The numbers under “Image Crop -> Aspect Ratio” don’t seem to do anything and sometimes won’t let me enter any values. What are they for anyways?

This crop does not work when I try to save the crop as thumbnail only – I want to show a cropped image as a thumbnail in a gallery page, and then show the full version when launched in the lightbox. Is this possible

Thanks for the good post. So far I figured out what you have written. What I can’t manage is following:

My featured image is 960×332 to fit into home page slider. When I crop the picture I want to save cropped part as thumbnail so I can include it in the post. That is all managed by WP itself. What I didn’t mange is to change thumbnail from default crop to the crop I selected. No matter how many times I have cropped, saved, deleted or whatever is possible I can’t complete it. Could you please, explain it. Thank you!

@petebocken The save button is greyed out because the selection is still being made. Make your selection, then click the “Crop” button in the upper right to confirm the selection. Then it will perform the crop and you can save the result.

I had been confused by this, too, and though that crop either didn’t work on my installation or only worked for certain file types (ie jpg but not png). The process of selecting first and clicking “Crop” second seems opposite of other programs that I’ve used, such as Acrobat and Picasa. But, at least I know how to do it now!

Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.

Get all 87 amazingly beautiful WordPress themes by Elegant Themes for only $69. That is like $0.79 per theme!

Featured In

About WPBeginner®

WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).